Hello and welcome back to the Retail podcast live from NRF
with Big Commerce. I'm lucky enough to be joined by
Senior Vice President Meghan Stabler.
Yeah, that alright. High five on now.
Yeah, it's been a long. Day take number six, just in
case you Why are we Live 5 live at the beginning of the show?
But anyway, as you can say, we're already having fun with
Big Commerce. So Megan, Yeah, if you don't
mind, just take us through about what Big Commerce does for those
who don't know what the focus is.
And what I'd love to know is what's been top of mind for a
retailer's coming to you? During this show, all right.
So Big Commerce is an enterprise e-commerce platform.
So you know our our ability to provide the world's leading
brands and retailers with world class ecommerce experience,
right, a modern tech stack. So people have probably heard
about composability and things, right.
So we're composable e-commerce platform.
You probably got brands and retailers that are both B to C
and maybe B to B. So we, we provide both
capabilities and that sort of modern tech stack to really take
advantage of you know what is needed in today's business that
connect to shoppers wherever they are.
And then we have a subsidiary called Phenomics, which is all
about optimising your data feed and feed management to make sure
you're connecting to the channels that you care about
where shoppers are out. So the Instagrams are tik toks,
right? And so optimising data feeds is
also one of the core things that we do.
And and you build that as in like you help retailers with the
whole stack in terms of from or is there one specific element of
that is that? Such no, the whole stack, I mean
you know our focus is making sure that brands and retailers
can build online unique experiences or offline unique
experiences too and combine it together.
So as a modern ecommerce platform, we're not a monolith
where a composable platform, you can just do pure either be you
can have direct to consumer if you want to as well, yeah, or
you can just be pure B to C So we enable you to combine all of
those in in a tech stack with a high performing checkout, create
unique, compelling experiences, integrate advanced functionality
from many of our partners like Bloom Reach or Algolia,
integrate content management systems like Content Stack or
Contentful into it and really build this wonderful experience.
So we find brands and retailers literally a changing the way
that they want to engage with their shoppers and their
consumers online and they have to find those right.
Tech stacks, Yeah, they make you work to connect to them.
And as I said, they've also got to connect to the channels where
I may be shopping their Instagrams that Tik Toks, right
and all those other platforms. So we enable that from within
the platform and within our ecosystem of of providers to
him. What's been in terms of when you
think about your experience here at NRF and the the?
The. Volume of retailers trying to
solve their different problems What What's your sense?
What do you feel? Everyone's all focused.
On look, you know it's 2024, beginning of 2024, people have
people and businesses have spent that sort of fast, rapid couple
of years through the COVID era, right.
You know they had to rapidly accelerated into you know, buy
online, pick up curbside, right. They had to think about buy now,
pay later for shifting economic conditions.
So we know that brands and retailers had to rapidly adopt
tech. You know, we're a couple of
years past the pandemic and now the beginning to say, well hold
on, is our tech stack that we have around us really the right
one? We've been on Salesforce for a
long time. We're Adobe for a long time.
Yeah. And yeah, those are great
platforms, but are they really delivering what we need for the
future of where retail needs to be or the future of our brand?
Are we able to rapidly innovate and build into the platform and
connect to shoppers on whatever surface they are, the mobile,
the tablets or, you know, live stream shopping, all these other
things? So there's the ecom, digital
marketers. CDOs are really looking at
what's next in retail. Yeah, they're beginning to think
about what do we need to have in terms of tech stack?
Do we buy one from everybody? Yeah.
Or can we think about things like Lego, right, and start to
see we just need a advanced search and merge or we need to
have a really good integrated CMS or we're going to have a
really solid ERP or OMS or IMS, right?
Yeah. It doesn't have to be all one
platform, but we can integrate all these things, make it to
what you want, right. So, you know, in the UK, right,
where you're from, you know, the white stuff, Yeah, right.
Or Ted Baker. Yeah, right.
Other brands, look, Hurler, right, high end fashion, right.
They're really looking at what they can do.
Or again, I talked about B2B, think about MKM building
supplies in the UK, right. So traditional building
supplies, but they need to have a modern tech stack because we
as consumers are buying things from them.
But they also have that sort of wholesale distributors outside
due to it that they need to provide that modern tech saying
too, yeah, so we're seeing a lot of adjustment and people coming
by the booth and saying, so tell me what you do and how you do it
differently because we all say e-commerce and we all say
online, right. What do you do differently?
Checkout is strong for us. Building that composable
platform, the integrations to get you live sooner is, is key
as well. So those are the really rigid
conversations we're having with people saying tell me more.
How do you just out of curiosity the ecommerce like is there a
post element? Do you connect to the post?
Yep. Or is there is there a post
version of what you do online? You know we we do have a point
of sale integrations across many of the different point of sales.
We have integrations to like you know all different PPS.
You know whether you're using PayPal, Braintree or using Agen
or you want to use Stripe or you only use advanced checkout
Stripe link right one page checkout.
Our role is to make e-commerce as seamless as possible.
Not just for you as the administrator and the builder of
your your site and the experience and embedding AR and
virtual reality and all those other new things that are coming
are using AI to to to really streamline things.
Yeah. But also to make sure that
you're connecting to the fastest checkout the the sort of Google
pays and the apples and the wallets right Or getting into
stripe link one page pass useless checkout and those are
the punishes we have. And why is that important?
Because if I'm a purchaser on a site, we're always, always
getting interrupted and doing different things right.
I wanna make sure that I'm giving you, as the brand or the
retailer, the ability to check somebody out immediately without
going to multiple pages. Yep, I want to give you the
ability. If you are saying you know what,
we see a lot of the demographics that we want to sell products to
on Instagram or are on TikTok, we want to give you that ability
to check out on into Instagram or shop on Instagram, right, and
make it seamless, right. So having the integrations with
our partnerships and our ecosystem is core to enable the
brand and retailer really to grow and to acquire the shoppers
wherever they are. In that instance, right.
I my view is biassed by because of two things, emotional or
neat, right? The emotion is, Oh my gosh, I
love that blouse or I love those sneakers.
I'm gonna have the same thing. So instead of an emotional, in
the moment purchase, if you're doing the right retargeting or
advertising, yeah, I want to be able to convert them right now.
Or it's a. Need so looking forward, I mean
interacting in one of the talks I was out there was talking
about how every retailer will have its own AI, right As us as
consumers will have our own AI retailers will have their
version of AI and I guess that led itself to what you're
saying. Do you build that yourself or do
you buy into somebody else's vision of what you what you can
have? So let me be a little bit
controversial. AIAI is nothing new, right?
We've used a I for a very long time in our lives.
Retailers and brands have been using a, it's an algorithm,
right? The algorithms have got smarter.
They got speed and scale to them now and now we're infusing it
with data, right. So that's the generative AI,
that's the other things we got. So AI is nothing brand new, it's
just speed, scale and then the incorporation of data right to
it. We've been using AI in product
data feeds to normalise data to optimise, give you a stronger
return on ad spend, improve your ROI and essentially get your
product described the right way for the different schemas.
Sure. Instagram's requirement for how
you describe a product is very different to TikTok is very
different to Amazon. So, right.
So we've been using AI to help really make sure that we remove
that manual effort and streamline it.
We've got a in the product, right.
So if you're doing search recommendations, right, you've
you've got inside it. I think AI as a whole including
for B to B by the way is like in improving the the order
management, right, or the invoice creation through AI
because we know from history and from data what you're trying to
do. So let's add those things in
check mark instead of you manually putting the things into
your your, your, your baskets and doing it.
So we are embedding AI into the product, right.
We're infusing it to help you make predictive analytics to
show you what's going on into the data, into combining data
leaks through, you know, Google Data Cloud and other things.
So AI is big, right? I mean, I I can't walk around so
many boos without seeing AI AI. AI, AI is the next step.
But you've got to be cautious on AI as well.
How are you going to use it, right.
I I don't think chat bots are there right now when it comes to
it. There's a booth opposite iOS
that has a generator that has an AI, hey, I'm a AI person here to
help you and you know it's AI, right.
So I think we got to, we used to go, but for today's retailers
and brands, look for the Econ platforms that are helping
streamline and optimise what you've got today, help you
generate your product listings and your descriptions, right.
We've got things that are different variants during a blue
sweater, right? You want to describe the
material, you may have different colours, different sizes,
different options. AI can help normalise that so
you don't manually have to do it.
And obviously wishing you, if we do things manually, we tend to
err, yeah. So I think a I is is very
beneficial in a lot of different things.
Final thoughts in terms of where next NRF, yeah, we're coming
back, Yep. What do you think you would have
achieved, helped retailers achieve in 2024?
What should they be doing in 20? 20 I'll tell you a couple of
quick things. Optimising, normalising your
product data feeds and speeds into as many channels as you can
do. And that's one thing we can do
real quick. Provide an ROI in about a month
and show you the value of doing that and why.
Return on ad spend improved average order value rate.
All of the things that we wanted to wanted to do 2 would be speed
of checkout, right? Making sure you got one page
password. Let's check out on key PSP's and
wallets. Apple, Google Pay, PayPal,
Stripe, Adrian, maybe others in top of it too because they have
to check the people out. And probably the third thing is
showing that, you know, we have one of the fastest if not the
fastest checkouts in the world on our platform for brands and
retailers to use. Right.
Perfect. Mayor, it's been.
I don't need to check your surname again because that's
good. That's good.
Thank you. Cheers Alex.
Good.